Santa Cruz do Castelo: A Village Inside the Walls
Why is it significant?
Slow down in these quiet lanes, where the tourist crowds thin out and you hear a radio through an open window, a broom on a doorstep, a neighbour calling across the street. You are still inside the castle walls, but this is not a monument. People live here.
Key Facts
| Place | Santa Cruz do Castelo: A Village Inside the Walls |
|---|---|
| Address | Largo de Santa Cruz do Castelo, 1100 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71370, -9.13220 |
| Part of Walk | Saints, Sieges and Stairways: Alfama and the Castelo de São Jorge in Lisbon |
| Generated | Generated |
Slow down in these quiet lanes, where the tourist crowds thin out and you hear a radio through an open window, a broom on a doorstep, a neighbour calling across the street. You are still inside the castle walls, but this is not a monument. People live here.
Santa Cruz do Castelo is the old neighbourhood that grew up within the outer ring of fortifications after the conquest of 1147. Christian settlers, soldiers and servants of the royal household moved into the houses of the defeated Muslim population, and a parish took shape around a church dedicated to the Holy Cross. Tradition holds that the first church here was raised soon after the conquest.
The church on the small square is not that medieval building. Like so much of Lisbon, the earlier church was badly damaged in 1755, and what stands now is a later rebuilding, plain outside and calm within. The parish, though, kept its old identity, and the castle's patron, Saint George, has always been at home in this little community.
Look at how the houses press up against the old walls. For centuries, families built right into the fortifications, using ancient stones as the back wall of a kitchen. When the dictatorship restored the castle around 1940, many of the buildings attached to the walls were cleared away to make the ramparts look medieval again. The neighbourhood survived, but it lost part of itself to the idea of how a castle should look.
There is something touching about this place. Kings came and went, the court moved down to the river, the earthquake brought the palace down, and still there were people hanging out washing and arguing about football inside the walls of Lisbon's oldest fortress. Now let the lanes carry you out of the quarter and back down the south side of the hill, to the terrace of Santa Luzia, with its tiles and its bougainvillea.